Thursday, February 07, 2008

Conserving valuable resources

So I mentioned that one of my projects for the week was rewiring the home theater. Well, I've (mostly) finished, except for two last things:

First, I still need to rewire the surround speakers; but I have to pick up some wire concealing channel before I do that (I'm moving my surrounds from a shelf behind our heads, to ceiling mounts to the side of our listening positions).

More importantly, I need to re-program the radio presets.

Now, for someone as anal as me, radio presets are a limited resource, not to be wasted. Unfortunately, Mel and I have very varied listening tastes. Although we have a large overlap of things we both like, and a relatively small section of styles and stations only one of us listens to; together we listen to a BUNCH of different styles of music...

..and as I said, I'm anal about that sort of thing. I hate having my presets out of order; and I order them by style, and listening frequency.

My receiver has three bands; FM, AM, and Sirius. I don't actually listen to any terrestrial radio except the local talk stations; and I haven't since I first got Sirius almost 5 years ago.

Sirius is just plain better: Better quality, better selection and variety, better playlists, better DJs, and of course, NO COMMERCIALS.

I can't wait for the Sirius/XM merger to finally go through. There are a couple stations on XM that I'd like, and that don't overlap with Sirius.

Mel on the other hand still listens to local radio a lot (lord knows why).

Anyway, most receivers give you a relatively limited set of presets, say 8 or 10 per bank; but they usually give you a bank or two per band. My receiver is a little different, in that it gives me 40 presets, but they're mixed across all three bands.

That's pretty cool actually, because it means no wasted presets. I only listen to two terrestrial radio stations, one AM and one FM, and Mel listens to maybe a half dozen more. If it was one of those "4 banks of 10, assigned per band" things, we'd have a bunch of blank presets, which as I've said, I'm anal about.

Of course some genius in designing this receiver made it so you can't set presets from the remote, you have to get down on your hands and knees and press a combination of tiny buttons under a cover on the faceplate.

Joy... but livable. I don't change presets very often.

What's been the issue, is winnowing down to 40 presets, and figuring out how to order them.

Again I freely admit, I am anal about this stuff.

Obviously, unless you're a Sirius subscriber, these won't mean a thing to you; and even if you are, there's still the local terrestrial stations for Phoenix mixed in there; but here's our list of 40 ( winnowed down from the 70 or so we originally had listed - like I said, very varied):